Though Cowards Flinch

Mark R. Levin is a talk show host in America and is much considered by his critics to be like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – idiotic but loud.

In 2009 he wrote a book called “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” in which he made a meager attempt at proving global warming to be false – at the despair even of fellow conservatives such as Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, who went on to call the book a case for “willful ignorance”.

But willful ignorance is the order of the day – and nowhere better can this be seen than in the very Republican circles that Levin treads.

Though this should not have affected Newt Gingrich’s standing – the candidate with a PhD! Surely as the heavyweight he would not water down his message – the people respect a guy who knows what he is doing, right?

With Herman Cain out the contest now (the author of the words uz-beki-beki-stan-stan) Gingrich is having to fill his place for dumbing down and, as aforementioned, willful ignorance.

So right on cue, at a church in Texas recently, he said:

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” he said.  “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

A secular atheist country dominated by radical Islamists is not only a mouthful, but a bloody headfuck.

This is the same chap who was recently lampooned by conservative pundit George Will in the Washington Post for his “intellectual hubris” and “enthusiasm for intellectual fads” not to mention the charge that Newt “would have made a marvelous Marxist, [believing] everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”

Now more than ever before should Paul Krugman’s words of wisdom about Gingrich should apply: “Newt Gingrich is a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like”.

It should be noted that after Manzi took issue with Levin’s book calling it willful ignorance, he then went on to say it was “an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.” Gingrich, I suppose, is only doing what is necessary of him.

Here’s a question: can there be an anti-capitalist conservatism?

It’s a question I will be thinking about in the next few months, and I’d be grateful to hear some thoughts.

John Gray, the author of among other books Black Mass, has noted, in his critical, yet supportive, piece on the recent spell of occupations, that demands of the established political class, from protesters should include:

not a full-scale retreat from globalisation … but a more restrained version of globalisation in which worldwide linkages grow organically, and different countries are not penalised for having different economic systems.

This should not be taken as support for government bureaucracy. Yuval Levin recently, in the US periodical National Affairs, tried to separate “capitalism from colossal corporations”. The real enemy to capitalism today is crony capitalism, which relies heavily upon corrupt government propping them up.

But a conservative anti-capitalism would go further still. Capitalism is a system that is in constant change, and seeks constant societal revolutions. And whereas socialist anti-capitalism seeks to replace society with a new social organisation, conservative anti-capitalism would want to put the brakes on, and reverse the tide to a more traditional system of days of old.

In the recent words of Daniel Ben-Ami, in his distinction of anti-capitalisms, Romantic anti-capitalism (as opposed to socialist anti-capitalism) “is essentially a reaction against modernity”.

There certainly is something in this, and it is coloured by post-Cold War perceptions of political systems. Before, conservatives knew where they stood when the economical game was fought between capitalism and communism. Today they may well maintain scepticism towards “anti-capitalism” as it tends towards leftist support for a more focal welfare state. But I suspect within good time we will start to talk about a dignified conservative anti-capitalism in itself.

It will be unique in its opposition to socialist planned economies, free-for-all corporatism and the constant change inherent to capitalism. It will distrust forced economic convergence between nations and be supportive of how John Gray has described the “worldwide linkages” grown organically.

There have been few articles on the subject, but for what there is already I’m assured that I’m not simply talking out my hat. But what do you think?

Peter Hitchens said something on Question Time last Thursday that no politician could ever say: “thank goodness we don’t have a democracy in this country”. For him this means that above elected representatives should be a level of unelected scrutiny, in the form of peers or, as he was referring, a constitutional Monarchy.

There is also another school of thinking, positioned by a quote which may or may not have come from Fredreich Nietzsche, questioning thus: “Do everybody deserve the vote”?

One might easily contend, also, that in the event of true British democracy Katie Price or Jeremy Clarkson could be our prime minister – so in a way we should count our lucky stars that our democracy is only a shadow of its full meaning.

I, however, take a different view, being in favour of democracy on principle and not seeing it as a utility that ought to be used when it suits me. As tyrants fall in the Middle East I know full well about the possibility of there being a radical Muslim Brotherhood element to post-Arab Spring politics, but appreciate that this must be challenged with ideas and committed action.

It certainly shouldn’t bolster the idea that more Middle Eastern democracy will be bad in itself. It might open the door to a raft of bad choices, but the importance of the freedom to do that trumps the sort of risk which would utilise tyranny as a precautionary mode of government.

Regarding mass political intentions, take the UK as an example. According to an Ipso Mori poll studying 2010/11 matters of political importance, immigration was more focal than the NHS, crime/law and order and unemployment, and leagues away from the 1997 general election run up where immigration was of very minor importance indeed.

In February 2011, from a sample of 1004 adults, 37% felt that immigration was a very big problem, 37% believed it was a problem, 16% felt it was not a very big problem and 5% felt it was not a problem at all.

Further, according to a YouGov poll studying the same period, 35% of those who voted Conservative in 2010 appealed to family values over anything else, 41% voted for them on matters of traditional values (compared to just 19% for Labour) and 28% on patriotism – while only 6% voted for the Tories appealing to tolerance and diversity (which, actually, Cameron sought to highlight).

In his efforts to woo the small l liberals and the Guardian reading middle classes, David Cameron paid less attention to the things the Tories had always trumped Labour on during the campaign before the 2010 election (immigration being key) and developed his narrative around public services, the economy, the environment and international development.

But clearly Cameron is not naive here. As Tim Bale in a recent article for The Political Quarterly has drawn upon, Cameron suffered a tough loss in the Ealing and Southall by-election in 2007, looked weak after the so –called “Brown bounce” – then by no coincidence at all appeared on Newsnight, talking about how people were worried about the pressures of immigration on public services.

However after some time, he went back to concentrating on the small l liberals with articles for the Guardian and his softly softly approach to crime; and it didn’t pay. The election that should have been a walkover for Cameron was scuppered, meaning he relied on the Liberal Democrats to join a coalition with him.

He failed to secure an outright majority, not because he failed to modernise his party, a project which has been in the making since Hague and possibly before that (given a slight shelving during Howard’s time – which Cameron was actually key to, writing as he did the manifesto which concentrated heavily on issues regarding asylum, a subject on which the Tories were predictably stronger on, according to the public, than Labour, who did, however, lead on everything else), but because he neglected what I want to call the Tories’ “toxic constituency” – those for whom no previous Conservative voting typology (for example nationalist, federalist, atlanticist, European, free market, interventionist, liberal, collectivist) has ever concentrated on.

The camp, you could say, who vote in accordance with Daily Express headlines.

Like Blair with the left wing of his party, he knew they had no other choice, so could shift the party to the right in full knowledge that he’d still benefit from their vote. Cameron assumed he could toe the centre ground of politics and keep his toxic constituency. He was wrong.

But perhaps he has realised. In October Daniel Knowles, writer for the Telegraph, criticised Mr Cameron for what he called his dog-whistle politics on immigration. As he said in his article “Like Europe, immigration control is one of those things which it’s much easier to shout about than to change.” He concluded by saying “If he were truly a liberal Conservative, the Prime Minister would face up to that, instead of trying to distract us with Right-wing mythology.”

But maybe Mr Cameron is liberal. The point is, is his core vote liberal? Is Cameron thinking what they are thinking? Has the time come for Mr Cameron to shift rightwards in order to keep his eyes firmly on the prize of overall majority? Polls and e-petitions certainly suggest that if he took that course he may have a fighting chance, which is depressing for those, such as myself, with ideas to contrary – but such is the reality.

Of course Cameron and his party could try and change hearts and minds. But political parties are not there to deal with ideas; they are there to win elections. For now that is.

Slavoj Zizek has this to say on the subject of a modern saturated form of left wing politics:

Lenin’s politics is the true counterpoint not only to the Third Way pragmatic opportunism, but also to the marginalist Leftist attitude of what Lacan called le narcissisme de la chose perdue. What a true Leninist and a political conservative have in common is the fact that they reject what one could call liberal Leftist “irresponsibility” (advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, etc., yet ducking out when one has to pay the price for it in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures): like an authentic conservative, a true Leninist is now afraid to pass to the act, to assume all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project. Rudyard Kipling (whom Brecht admired) despised British liberals who advocated freedom and justice, while silently counting on the Conservatives to do the necessary dirty work for them; the same can be said for the liberal Leftist’s (or “democratic Socialist’s”) relationship towards Leninist Communists: liberal Leftists reject the Social Democratic “compromise,” they want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean. In contrast to this false radical Leftist’s position (which wants true democracy for the people, but without the secret police to fight counterrevolution, without their academic privileges being threatened), a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it.

This distinction between a true leftist and his liberal counterparts, and the parity between a leftist and his conservative brothers, is made all the more interesting when we consider Ed Burke’s reasoning for opposing the demands of enlightenment thinkers and French revolutionaries in particular.

Jeremy Stangroom had this to say on the politics of Burke:

Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time.

The common view of traditional conservatism from the point of view of the left is that it favoured a strong aristocracy or ruling class on the grounds that this structure had been divinely justified.

Burke, in fact was a deeply religious thinker, and yet his grounds for favouring this system is based more upon the weak basis of theories to the contrary of it.

He did not necessarily feel that political conceptions of natural right, which had emerged from enlightenment values, were wrong, ipso facto, but that the basis for reforming society on liberty, equality and other such predicates, were theoretically weak.

Thus Burke, and many others in the conservative tradition, appealed to a political realism rather than a political idealism – the politics of the day for enlightenment thinking.

Indeed the politics of the left that Zizek is thinking of above – that is to say Leninism – has its own issues with enlightenment thinking in its purest form (if we consider the disparity between scientific socialism and its utopian variant).

Enlightenment thinking had in fact supposed that in the absence of a corrupting modern society, men would become systematically – by their very nature – capable of rationality.

This supposes a rational human nature – of which Marxist-Leninism has no truck.

The parity between the left and conservatives – both in their traditional forms, before the purge of postmodern mush in modern politics – is in the role of government being the mediator of rationality, based loosely on a view of humanity that denies its monolithic nature (for Burke humans were the “fallen” in the religious sense of the word; for Marxists humans are mediated subjects through which ideology is transmitted).

From the outset, and in opposition to a modern political perversity, conservativism is the natural political ally of leftism, where liberalism is its political adversary.

American columnists speak at the moment of conservative “epistemic closure” to describe the debasing of modern conservatism’s glorious legacy, first used in this context by libertarian writer and Economist blogger Julian Sanchez as short-hand for “ideological intolerance and misinformation”. The idea is to show that conservatism has hit a wall and is appealing to low, base politics of xenophobia or ad hominem attack, as opposed to its rich, great tradition.

British conservatism has had a fair deal of “epistemic closure” in recent years also, and it’s something for the left to consider when we vent our criticisms on the right wing. When we think of conservatism today we might erroneously think of Thatcher and Major – but they were merely leaders of the conservative party.

Those in the conservative camp of the Conservative party who believe the primary lie of neo-liberal capitalism – that it opens up a space for us all to become a little bit rich, and turns the fixed triangle shaped class system into a flexible circle of freedoms – would’ve hated what Thatcher was doing by listening to those woolly Austrian and Chicago-school libertarians.

We know now they had little to worry about.

But the Thatcher/Major legacy, truth be told, will be less seen in the scheme of things as expressions of conservatism, and seen more as a new and epochal means to counter working class empowerment and intolerance of the foreign other.

For this reason I had some respect for Respublica and Phillip Blond. Aside from all bloated, first year philosophy course, flower eating nonsense that he talks about on virtue and politicians, what Blond did succeed in doing was to show that conservatism in this country was not the sum of the Thatcher/Major epistemic closure, but something that could be committed to community and civic participation, and not simply at the beck and call of the markets (which is rightly seen as a perversion of conservatism of the type Disraeli would have aligned himself to).

Cameron was keen to pal-up with Blond in the early days, with that timeless gag about voting blue was to go green. Though with Blond to vote blue was to go “red”. With Blond’s hat-tipping to one nation conservatism, and Cameron’s “progressivism” (by which has always meant an emotional relationship with the NHS, and therefore informing the decision to keep it) the Tories had the chance to sweep up the centre ground and remain Europhobic enough to keep the right from joining the UK Independence party. In short, drop the nasty party image.  Cameron had five years to do that before the election – and he failed.

The right wing of his party, Redwood for example, might be silent now, but give it time.

If I was interested in politics to score points then I, as a Labour supporter and socialist, would not care a hoot about conservatism. But this is not the case. Conservatism is not the sum total of xenophobia, big business and nastiness; this is its own expression of epistemic closure. But what almost five years of David Cameron as leader of the opposition and leader of the Conservative party has shown is that the return to real conservatism has botched. And this does not bade well considering the conditions in which that project was tested – 13 years out of office, a melee of leaders of all shapes and sizes, a global recession, and still they couldn’t exploit this enough – to think everyone in their camp assumed it would be a walkover.